Luminary Micro adds thirteen MCUs based on ARM Cortex-M3 Core

Austin, Tex.  Luminary Micro has beefed-up its line of ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based microcontrollers with the launching of thirteen Stellaris family members and their associated development kits. The devices are all available now from $3.94 to $5.47 in 10K unit resale quantities.ellaris family members and their associated development kits. The devices are all available now from $3.94 to $5.47 in 10K unit resale quantities.

The industrial-grade devices pack up to 64 KBytes single cycle flash, 8KB single cycle SRAM, speeds up to 50 MHz, and up to eight analog-to-digital converter (ADC) channels with up to 1M samples per second sample rate. Two of the new devices also offer Quadrature Encoder Input (QEI) capabilities in the motion control unit.

Luminary Micro is ARM's lead partner for the Cortex-M3 processor with six previously announced Stellaris MCUs, including the entry-level LM3S101 MCU priced at $1.00. For details, see entry level unit.

Luminary Micro's Stellaris family of microcontrollers are still the only Cortex-M3 implementations available in silicon form. The feature set of each Stellaris device is ideal for applications such as building and home automation; factory automation and control; industrial control power devices; stepper motors; brushed and brushless DC motors; and AC induction motors.

A complete Stellaris family Product Selector Guide detailing features of each device can be found at Selector guide.

For details of the chip, see block diagram below.

The company's development kit, which was announced in March with the first two Stellaris products, supports the entire Stellaris line. The development kit is a modular design with a unique daughterboard for each family member and a common motherboard. The kit comes ready-to-go with bundled software and tools designed to get users running in 10 minutes or less. In addition to the development hardware, the bundle includes Luminary Micro's peripheral driver library; comprehensive documentation, schematics, and example programs as well as all cables and jumpers. Users of more than one Stellaris family member can simply change out the daughterboard to accommodate new products " the daughterboard kits are available individually. The development kit carries the CE seal of compliance to the mandatory European requirements and is fully certified.

The development kit also includes evaluation versions of popular software and hardware development tools. The software tools packages included are ARM's RealView Microcontroller Development Kit, which incorporates the industry-proven Keil uVision development environment; CodeSourcery's Sourcery G++ GNU tools including the Eclipse debugger; and IAR Systems' Embedded Workbench development environment. The development kit also includes FreeRTOS.org, Pumpkin's Salvo Lite, Micrium's uC/OS-II, and Express Logic's ThreadX real-time operating systems. All of the real time operating systems are optimized for small-footprint applications, and all of the ports include extensive programming examples. Stellaris family development kits for the family are available for $249.